Ray Ison, Professor in Systems at the UK Open University since 1994, is a member of the Applied Systems Thinking in Practice Group. From 2008-15 he also developed and ran the Systemic Governance Research Program at Monash University, Melbourne. In this blog he reflects on contemporary issues from a systemic perspective.

Thursday, March 08, 2018

'Rather than using primary sources, Pinker draws on anecdote,
cherry-picking and discredited talking points developed by
anti-environmental thinktanks.Take, for example, Pinker’s claims about
the landmark Limits to Growth report,
published in 1972. It’s a favourite target of those who seek to dismiss
environmental problems. He suggests it projected that aluminium,
copper, chromium, gold, nickel, tin, tungsten and zinc would be
exhausted by 1992. It is hard to see how anyone who had read the report
could form this impression. The figures it uses for illustrative
purposes have been transformed by some critics into projections.

Its actual prediction is that “the great majority of the currently
important non-renewable resources will be extremely costly 100 years
from now”. It would be perfectly reasonable to take issue with this
claim. It is not reasonable to recycle, then attack, a widely circulated
myth about the report. That’s called the straw man fallacy. It is contrary to the principles of reason that Pinker claims to champion.'